From The Resources That You Already Have: A Visual History of Google Algorithm Changes
I was digging for this piece and found a few solid stories that illustrates perfectly how all the changes made could have affected your business and you didn’t even know it chances are so I will quote from the masters. “In the beginning, Google’s search engine really wasn’t all that good. This was back in the late 90s/early 00s, when search engines were little more than keyword-matching and link-counting machines. Ranking high in search results could be accomplished by essentially using a simple, two-step procedure:

• Step 1: Insert your keyword phrase often, but not too much.
• Step 2: Obtain as many inbound links as you possibly could.

For those early “SEO gurus” who gamed the system – achieving high rankings while adding little value for actual searchers — the fun wouldn’t last. Every time Google found a weakness in its ability to deliver relevant, high-quality search results, it made fixes to address it. Starting in 2003 with “Boston,” major changes to its algorithm are adorned with names and made regularly,” Erik went onto say on in the piece.

Attribution for image below to https://blog.hubspot.com/

Good Alternative or Bad?

So, let me break this down for you, ‘alt text’ stands for ‘image alternate text’ and Image alt text can also be considered the keywords “behind ‘ hidden the image”.  So called, ‘SEO specialists’, try to use image alt text to cram keywords inside their images guessing that these “invisible keywords” will improve their relevance ranking.  This is a major thing NOT TO DO when trying to increase SEO ranking.  It may work, yes, but for a short time most likely and it is not the original design and purpose of the image ‘alt text’ attribute.

The image alt text is supposed to describe what the image is about so that when you search in the image SERP (Search Engine Results Page) of various search engines, your picture is ranking well for certain keywords. Relevant keywords pertaining that image which you tagged with an alt text.
How do you use image alt text?

When you look at the image HTML code, it looks something like this:

<img src =”https://sample-image-url.com” alt=”this is where you put the alt text”/>
The key to creating good alt tags consists of three points:

• Image needs a proper description, without keyword stuffing.
• It should be keyword rich.
• It needs to be short and to the point.

How do you use image alt title?

The code used should look something like this:
<img src=”https://sample-url-here.com” alt =”sample alt text here” title=”sample title text here”/>

The Special Sauce Final Tips: Does the images name in each and every file upload to your server / site image file name matter?

I’m now leaning towards a yes, but more study under the current algorithm needs to be done to be sure.  However, I would strongly suggest that that before you upload an image, change the file name first into the best description possible for that certain, specific image that you have. Crisp, clear and optimizing images is one arena that you will compete in whether you like it or not.

Carpe Diem My Friends

SOURCES: by Erik at https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-site-keyword-optimize-ht and Sean at https://seo-hacker.com